Shadowlands (48 page)

“You think?” River shook her head, mouth twisted to one side. “Well, well, well. You’ve just made a serious mistake, my Rider friend. A
very
serious mistake.”

Badger grinned back at her. “Maybe the last one he’ll ever make, huh?”

This time River got her phone all the way out of her pocket before she shoved it back in.

“What?”

“This is too important. We need to tell Fox face-to-face.”

Wolf was gone, and then he was back, and then we were outside the tower, and Wolf was helping me on my Cloud Horse. I don’t know whether it was the distraction, but I was actually feeling a bit better.

“That’s Moon’s.” I’d meant to get hold of Wolf’s wrist where the
gra’if
was, but I’d touched this golden bangle, about as thick around as my little finger, instead. “I don’t mean that’s her bracelet,” I said, letting go of it. “I mean that’s her hair.”

Wolf had been looking over his shoulder at the tower’s broken door, as if worrying that something else might come at us. “Yes. She made it.”

“And you made her one.” It occurred to me I
hadn’t
seen a dark bangle made of Wolf’s hair to match this one on Moon’s wrist. Only Lightborn’s pin on her collar. Anyone could see the significance of that.

Wolf heaved himself up into his own saddle and the Cloud Horse turned so we were facing each other. “After Truthsheart became High Prince, both Moon and I had need of a place of family, a place to rest and finish the Healing she had begun.” Wolf stroked the horse’s neck. “We were fostered with Honor of Souls, the mother of Lightborn. One day she spoke of this old manner of making a keepsake between members of a
fara’ip
.” Wolf turned it on his wrist. “I remembered seeing them on the wrists of some of the Wild Riders, so Moon and I made our own.”

I touched the bracelet again. It was like touching Moon, but different. Touching something that belonged to someone often gave me much clearer images, since I didn’t have the person’s emotional state to contend with.

“She’s in the Shadowlands,” I said. “With Alejandro. No, with Elaine.” I glanced up at Wolf, but his face didn’t change. I started to relax, then tightened up again. “Does she have one of these? Of yours? Can it be used to locate you? To Move to you?”

But Wolf was already shaking his head. “Impossible. Only
gra’if
can be used in that fashion, and then only by those with powerful
dra’aj
.” He gestured to his throat. “The High Prince wears the Guardian Prince’s torque, for example, and he hers. They can use the torques to Move to one another, but—”

“But they’re the Princes, okay, I get it. And the bad guys don’t
use
gra’if
anyway, even if they were powerful enough, which they’re probably not. Sorry I brought it up.”

I was sorrier that I’d said that. I had to shut my eyes and breathe slowly to make sure nothing else got brought up.

“Valory?”

I swallowed, my ears popped, and I realized I had better take more Gravol. I would have been nodding if it hadn’t meant the world would have wobbled. “Okay.” I paused a moment to phrase my words properly. “Let’s go. A specific question. Concentrate.”

Wolf thought for a moment, doing as I’d instructed. “What are the lyrics that will lead us to the Ice Tor?”

I reached out then, and took a firm grip on his arm above both bracelet and
gra’if
. At first, I felt nothing but the warmth of Wolf’s skin, the muscles trembling just beneath. Maybe I was too tired after all. Too sick. This had never happened to me before, I always got
something
. I swallowed, and I was looking for the words to tell Wolf we weren’t going anywhere, when information started coming. [The scars on his face had come from a clawing he’d suffered when someone else wanted to be Pack Leader; blue had been his favorite color; he’d been annoyed and envious when his little brother had manifested his Guidebeast first.] And then everything else had faded into the background, and all I could see/read/feel was the Song.

“‘Where the sun stands high in the north, never setting;

Where the chill wind creeps down from western crags.’”

I let go and the images stopped. “That can’t be right. The western wind is always warm.” Wolf raised his eyebrows. “Well, in any poetry I’ve ever heard anyway.”

“Shadowland poetry?”

“I take your point. Anyway, the next bit goes ‘Soft footfalls trace the edge of air; A cold snake lurks in the valley.’” I stopped singing and cleared my throat. “That’s how it starts anyway. Is it supposed to rhyme? Because this part didn’t come out that way.”

“Not always,” Wolf said. “They are easier to remember if rhymed, but there are many Songs, and passages of Songs, that do not.” I took another breath, but Wolf stopped me before I could recite any more. “That is enough for us to begin,” he said. “If I Sing, we should Ride to that part of the Road closest to what I describe.”

Suddenly I wanted to tell him I couldn’t go, that I was too sick,
that I couldn’t make it. That maybe I should lie down for a while after all. I told myself there was no way to know if lying down was going to make me feel any better. There hadn’t been any food for me to eat, but since I could only drink tiny sips of the purest of water without gagging, that hadn’t seemed so important. So far, we hadn’t really taken that much time; I certainly didn’t feel hungry. But wouldn’t I feel the lack of food eventually? We had to find the Horn and get back to the Shadowlands—back home—while I was still able to function.

We set off once more. Now Wolf Sang under his breath the whole time. I don’t know how he knew the tune—maybe he was making it up as he went along—but as he Sang, he urged his Cloud Horse forward, and we almost immediately left the dense woods for a grassy path where the trees were well spaced and there was little underbrush.

Then, so suddenly it made me blink, we were riding along the edge of a steep hill, with a narrow valley below us, a stream winding along its bottom, far below.

“Um. Are we headed in the right direction?”

“Look.” Wolf pointed upward. I shaded my eyes with my hand and looked. “The sun in the northern sky. And do you not feel the wind? Look below, I would wager the water in that stream is cold enough.” I directed my eyes downward without moving my head. The stream did sort of look like a snake, now that he mentioned it. “We have begun.”

I had to take his word for it. In fact, I had to take his word for most of the rest of the day’s journey—if it was a day. I found out for certain why they called the place the “Lands,” in plural. From the hillside, we came around the shoulder of a rock and were suddenly in the dark. It was raining, and I would have freaked completely except that we were on what seemed to be a paved road, and the rain was warm. Nevertheless, Wolf passed out short cloaks from a pack he had behind his saddle and as soon as I had mine around me not only did the rain not fall on me, but where it
had
fallen, I was immediately dry. I could see how useful one of these would be at home—not that there was a lot of cloak wearing on the streets of Toronto.

“We’d be rich if we could make umbrellas out of this stuff,” I said. But either he didn’t hear me, or I hadn’t spoken aloud.

The dark rainy road turned into a sandy beach that stretched out for kilometers ahead of us. Between one step and the next, we were in a field of some kind of grain, under cloudy skies, and then in a beautiful mountain meadow dotted with multicolored wildflowers. I went on reciting lines from the Song as we went. Wolf would repeat them after me in his warm liquid voice, and the landscape we were looking for would appear. I started to feel a bit dopey, like when you’re falling asleep watching a movie and you only catch glimpses here and there. At one point I wondered whether we were actually traveling into these places, or whether Wolf was calling them into being with his Singing.

Then I wondered why it would matter.

Suddenly, I found myself swallowing a lot, so much that I couldn’t get out the next line.

“Do you wish to dismount?” Wolf said. He reached out as if to take me by the elbow, to steady me, but I held up my own hand, warding him off.

“Don’t…touch…me,” I managed to say. It really felt as if I was going to puke. Very slowly, holding my head as level as I could, I got down from the Cloud Horse. My foot had no sooner touched the ground, however, than the world began to spin for real, and I had to cling to the saddle to keep upright.

“Wolf,” I croaked out. He must have seen what I was trying to do, because he immediately dismounted, and gave me a boost back onto my own horse. He’d only touched me for a moment, and all I got from him was a confused sea of faces and the knowledge that he didn’t know how his parents had died—and that he was afraid either he or Fox had something to do with it.

“I know.” I was leaning forward, clinging to my Cloud Horse’s neck, only dimly aware that I was getting no reading from him at all, and more than grateful for the respite. “How your parents died.” I must have been speaking aloud, because Wolf’s face was suddenly close to mine. “In the fullness of time,” I said. “Their
dra’aj
was returned to the Lands.”

“I thank the Chimera who guides me,” he said, like he was praying. “I feared…” He was just a little too scared to say out loud what it was he’d feared.

“S’okay. I know.”

“A little water? Must you take more of the pills?”

“Water.” Somehow, now that I was back on the Cloud Horse, my stomach was settling a bit, and I was able to manage a couple of sips of water.

“Should we rest?” There was real concern in his voice, but not just concern for me. Time was passing, and if I couldn’t feel it, Wolf could.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Part of me wants to lie down, but if what just happened is any indication, I should probably stay on the horse.” I never thought I’d hear myself say that.

“I have asked him not to let you fall.” Wolf was nodding. “Perhaps that is helping you. You may be able to sleep if we go forward slowly. Tell me the next ten lines or so, I will find the way, while you rest.”

So that’s what we did. I dozed, leaning forward, my arms around the Cloud Horse’s neck, warm and dry under me, my cheek against his skin, with the most pleasant smell of a recently mowed lawn. Never quite asleep, never completely awake, we followed as Wolf led us through several more landscapes, more than I wanted to keep track of. Eventually, I thought I was feeling a bit better and was thinking about trying to sit up, when the Cloud Horse stopped abruptly. I pushed myself upright.

We were in a valley, treed slopes to our right, rocks and scrub brush to our left. And, directly in front of us, a monster.

I was startled enough that I sat bolt upright, my motion sickness forgotten as adrenaline shot through my system.
That won’t help,
I thought. I don’t know what would have been worse, the nausea, or constantly cranking myself up to avoid it.

In front of us, blocking the path, was something I had never, in my wildest nightmares, wanted to see. It seemed to have some kind of snakelike body, what looked like a crow’s wings, each as big as a kitchen table, a bird’s head with a curved beak and a fleshy crest like a rooster’s comb, and a spiked and scaly tail. Its eyes were enormous and it kept turning its head, looking at us first with one eye and then the other. I couldn’t tell whether or not it had feet, but I guessed not, since it seemed to be thrashing back and forth on the ground.
Hound
, was the thought that gripped me.

The Cloud Horses didn’t shy, however, or bolt, which is certainly what I felt like doing, and I was startled to see that Wolf was leaning
forward with a look of interest on his face. I was more than surprised. The thing would have made me feel queasy to look at even if I wasn’t already suffering from motion sickness.

“What is it?” I think it smelled bad, too.

“A Cockatrice.” I could tell from Wolf’s tone that I was supposed to have known this.

“Uh-oh, that’s bad, isn’t it?”

“No cold winds from the west, and now you think a Cockatrice is an evil thing. Where do you humans get these ideas?”

That made me blink. It was true that humans did tend to assign abstract value to things, like dark being bad and light being good. Since I’d been introduced to the world of Faerie—sorry, I mean of the People—I thought I had a pretty good idea exactly where we got some of these ideas. But maybe Riders weren’t the best people to explain that to.

I tried to look at the Cockatrice without prejudice. My nose wrinkled up. No, it was definitely ugly, even if ugly didn’t mean evil.

At that moment the Cockatrice disappeared and in its place was the youngest Rider I’d ever seen. If human, I would have said he was twelve or thirteen, though he was already taller than me. He was a Moonward Rider, with jet-black hair hanging shaggy and loose down his back and brilliant green eyes. He was dressed completely in black—leather trousers, knee-high boots, sleeveless jerkin. I was surprised to see that he already bore a
gra’if
guard on his left arm.

“Did you see it? Did you see my Guide? I did it! I knew I could. My mother told me I should not try, but I
knew
I could.” He was beside himself with excitement, and I pegged his age a little lower. But then I took in what he’d said.